Abstract
Methamphetamine (meth) can greatly damage the prefrontal cortex of the brain and trigger dysfunction of the cognitive control loop, which triggers not only drug dependence but also emotional disorders. The imbalance between the cognitive and emotional systems will lead to crossmodal emotional deficits. Until now, the negative impact of meth dependence on crossmodal emotional processing has not received attention. Therefore, the present study firstly examined the differences in crossmodal emotional processing between healthy controls and meth dependents (MADs) and then investigated the role of visual- or auditory-leading cues in the promotion of crossmodal emotional processing. Experiment 1 found that MADs made a visual–auditory integration disorder for fearful emotion, which may be related to the defects in information transmission between the auditory and auditory cortex. Experiment 2 found that MADs had a crossmodal disorder pertaining to fear under visual-leading cues, but the fearful sound improved the detection of facial emotions for MADs. Experiment 3 reconfirmed that, for MADs, A-leading cues could induce crossmodal integration immediately more easily than V-leading ones. These findings provided sufficient quantitative indicators and evidences that meth dependence was associated with crossmodal integration disorders, which in turn was associated with auditory-leading cues that enhanced the recognition ability of MADs for complex emotions (all results are available at: https://osf.io/x6rv5/). These results provided a better understanding for individuals using drugs in order to enhance the cognition for the complex crossmodal emotional integration.
Highlights
Multisensory integration refers to the convergence or integration of multiple sensory signals into a biologically internal representation, which can maximize the effectiveness of information transmission in the ecological environment and improve the ACC of perception (Parise and Ernst, 2016)
The results of Experiment 1 showed that the crossmodal emotional disorder pertaining to fearful emotion was prevalent in methamphetamine dependents (MADs); that is, the response time (RT) for fearful emotion recognition in VA mode did not make a significant difference with V and A
This deficit was not found in neutral crossmodal processing, indicating that MADs did not have a wide range of VA integration disorder but only integrated obstacles for the fearful visual and auditory cues
Summary
Multisensory integration refers to the convergence or integration of multiple sensory signals into a biologically internal representation, which can maximize the effectiveness of information transmission in the ecological environment and improve the ACC of perception (Parise and Ernst, 2016). Emotional VA integration is an effective way to transmit and decode emotional information. Crossmodal Integration in Methamphetamine Dependence (Zhang H. et al, 2018), and it is of great significance to human survival and evolution. Bruck et al (2011) proposed the neurobiological model of multisensory emotional information processing. With perceptual processing as the first stage, the emotional VA information is extracted within modality-specific primary and secondary cortices. The emotional VA information is transmitted to the posterior superior temporal lobe, where a single emotional perception forms. The cognition and evaluation of emotion are accomplished in the DLPFC and OFC (Johnson et al, 2007)
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